Wild Midnight (2 page)

Rachel settled back in the seat with a small groan of dismay. She was already tired and dirty, and the day wasn’t half over. There had been one aggravating delay after another since they started their journey, well before dawn. At about four A.M. and only halfway to Savannah the truck’s fuel line had broken, and it had taken almost an hour’s work, with Rachel holding the flashlight for Mr. Wesley in a darkened, deserted service station until he got it fixed. Later, when they’d bought the tomato plants from a Florida trucker in the farmers market, she’d had to trust the Floridian’s word that the hundreds of packages they’d loaded were as good as the samples he’d opened to show them. The transaction was all new to Rachel; she’d had to defer to Mr. Wesley’s superior knowledge and the trucker’s assurances that what they were buying was a wilt-resistant, early-bearing strain suited for the South Carolina coast. Since it also turned out they were thirteen dollars short of the sum needed, Rachel had made up the difference out of her own pocket. By the time they’d left Savannah they were already running two hours late.
 

Now, on this Saturday morning, with people waiting for them in the cooperative’s fields just beyond, someone had put up a gate to keep them out.
 

“It’s a mistake,” Rachel said, frowning. She couldn’t understand why the sudden appearance of the cattle gate in the shadowy woodlands had so alarmed Mr. Wesley, but it had, and it was there, blocking their way. “This is a public road, and whoever put up that gate can’t shut us out. We have every right in the world to use it.”
 

Rachel put her hand on the door handle, opened it and jumped down to the ground. She was unpleasantly surprised to find that her legs were so cramped from long hours of traveling that she staggered the first few steps.
 

A faint wind stirred the long festoons of gray moss hanging in the thick stand of live oaks on either side of the forest road, shifting, the beams of yellow spring sunlight and deep, deceptive shadows. She heard Mr. Wesley give another sudden, warning hiss under his breath.
 

Then Rachel saw what the old man saw.
 

For one startled second she considered that Mr. Wesley’s ghostly hants might really have materialized in, the woods in front of them. Then unexpectedly light shifted again, and whatever it was rolled white-rimmed eyes, moving restlessly, as if about to charge them.
 

Rachel blinked. In the next moment she wanted to laugh. It was a horse! Imagination and moving light and shadows had turned the thing into a monster. It was only somebody’s stray horse!
 

She yanked down the tail of her chambray work shirt over her muddy jeans and turned to the old man in the front seat of the truck. “It’s only a horse, Mr. Wes, nothing to be alarmed about.” Rachel tried to shake off her own tiredness and the spell of the silent forest that enveloped them. No wonder her eyes and Mr. Wesley’s were playing tricks. “Just get the truck out of that hole and I’ll see what I can do about the gate.”
 

“The road’s closed.”
 

Rachel jumped. That rasping, ghostly sounding voice instantly sent a prickle of goose bumps along her bare arms.
 

“Get the, hell out of here.”
 

She leaned into the sunshine, putting her hand up to shade her eyes. She still couldn’t see anything. The man—and it was a man her rational mind told her, and not a ghost—was hidden. But he was there watching, just as Mr. Wesley had said.
 

“Who is it?” she whispered. “Who’s there?”
 

In the thick green-gray trees the horse threw up its head and the shadows lifted again. Rachel saw it carried a rider. As she peered against the sun she could see the horseman sat crosswise with one leg drawn over the pommel of the saddle, his other booted foot in the opposite stirrup. The big black horse moved restlessly again and tossed its head. Without shifting his lounging seat, the rider nudged the animal back under control with his knee. He held the reins to the big mount loosely and carelessly in the brown, callused palm open on his thigh.
 

“Who the hell are
you
?” the voice demanded.
 

Rachel squinted. The horseman was dressed in a T-shirt of a faded dark gray color, the knitted cotton clinging to an expanse of muscled chest and broad shoulders. He wore ancient patched jodhpurs and battered western-style cowboy boots. Where the sunlight hit his thick brown hair, it illuminated sun-bleached streaks that looked almost gilded. But it was his face that riveted one’s eyes.
 

Without moving from his slouching sidewise seat, the horseman nudged the big black out from under the trees.
 

Rachel found herself gaping. At the same moment she knew with a quick, perceptive rush that the man who faced her, eyes glittering, was accustomed to the effect he produced. The hard, cynical quirk of his mouth confirmed it.
 

This was no ghost, she thought for a wild moment, but it might as well have been. The man on horseback was just as unreal.
 

Somewhere Rachel had seen pictures that stuck in her memory—the handsome, idealized cowboys of a Frederick Remington painting, even the hard-faced purity of the young heroes of military recruiting posters—and they had been brought to life in this man’s mask of near-perfect virile beauty. The short, straight nose, strongly carved high cheekbones, and wide, graceful mouth might have been put together with an artist’s unerring eye for quicksilver strength and a particularly masculine sensitivity. But the chiseled features were flawed by a mouth that had hardened from youthful recklessness into something resembling indifferent cruelty. And the eyes—
 

They were, Rachel saw, stunned, a shade usually described as hazel, with flecks of gold in their gray-green depths, the irises startlingly marked by clear black rims. Fascinating eyes, quietly murderous.
 

They were staring at her just as intently. “I know who you are,” the voice said, “you’re Mrs. Whatsername.” The horseman rested the reins against his mount’s neck and leaned forward. The strange gaze traveled from the top of Rachel’s dark red hair and her flushed face, to the open neck of her work shirt and the full thrust of her breasts. The look dropped, and lingered at the front of her jeans where they strained into wrinkles over her crotch and thighs. “The woman with the tenant farmers.”
 

Rachel scarcely heard him. The phrase “being undressed by someone’s eyes,” suddenly had new meaning. The gaze that raked here with such practiced detachment was openly speculating what it would be like to have her. In the crudest of sexual terms. In bed. And didn’t care if she knew it. The jeweled look held a flicker of interest as she stiffened.
 

“Brinton,” Rachel managed between rigid lips as she went red to the roots of her dark auburn hair, “Mrs. Brinton.” She resisted the need to pull down her shirttail but she was painfully aware of her bedraggled appearance. “Someone has closed off our road so that we can’t get in.”
 

He kept staring. “You’re a Mennonite or something.” Then, with a touch of impatience, “Where’s your husband?”
 

Rachel’s blood was pounding in her temples. She raised her hand to her shirt collar, positioning her arm across her breasts.
 

“I’m a Quaker.” It was no more than a whisper.
 

Rachel Goodbody Brinton was twenty-six years old, an appealingly pretty, medium tall woman with a rather old-fashioned, lushly curved figure, now only partly concealed by a muddy chambray work shirt and jeans. And with a redheaded temper she usually managed to squelch, with the aid of her firm peaceable convictions. And she was a widow, but she couldn’t bring herself to say the word. Whether she was married or not was none of this man’s business. She was still amazed that she could feel so humiliated by a mere look, and find so little to do about it.
 

“We have a load of tomato plants in the truck that must be planted today or they’ll spoil.” She hated the way her voice sounded and the fact that her face was blazing. “We must get through the gate.”
 

“Go back to the highway. The road’s closed.”
 

By training and instinct Rachel believed in compromise and conciliation, but for the first time in her life she considered that perhaps both were going to fail her. She made a valiant effort to keep her voice steady. “We have people waiting for us, and we can’t keep them waiting much longer or they will go home. It’s impossible for us to turn back now.
 

The horseman’s eyes glittered. “The damned road’s private property. Now get out.”
 

She squinted against the sun. She knew he’d taken advantage of this, cleverly keeping his back to the light, just as he’d taken advantage of most everything else: materializing out of the shadows to startle Mr. Wesley and make him run the truck into a pothole, eyeing her in that insinuating way, undoubtedly waiting for them by the gate, perhaps for hours. Rachel set her rounded jaw stubbornly. She’d been told the field road had been open for years. The farmers’ cooperative, of which she was executive secretary, had been going in and out the past few weeks, and so had the gang plows and other machinery. No one had even registered a protest, until now.
 

“You are misinformed,” she said in her soft, determined voice. “This road runs between the property of Beaumont Tillson and the fields we have leased. He has never closed it off.” When only silence greeted her words, she went on, “In order to keep a road private one must close it off for forty-eight hours every year, that is the state law. Otherwise it becomes a public right of way. Mr. Tillson has not—”
 

“Crap,” the harsh voice said. “I’m Beaumont Tillson. And I say it’s closed.”
 

Rachel’s mouth dropped open. For a moment the rude words didn’t register. Beaumont Tillson was a much older man, she was sure of it. “You can’t be,” she blurted.
 

That wide, carved mouth tightened. “Lady, I know who the hell I am even if you don’t. And I’m telling you I don’t’want your damned tenant farmer trash making a four-lane highway of this woods.” He slid a long leg over the saddle and into the stirrup on the far side. He kneed the sidestepping, restless stallion into the road, reining it in tightly as it tossed its big black head. “The road belongs to me,” he said over the rattle of bridle and the sound of the black’s dancing hooves. “And I’m ordering you to get out.”
 

Rachel’s lips thinned. The black horse reared, spurred by its rider, and brought its forefeet down hard in the dust of the road less than a yard from her toes. She actually felt the breeze from those slashing hooves on the front of her jeans, and flinched. But she held her ground. They matched glares, her brown eyes steady against the crystal slits of furious gold-green. The horse reared again as the man on it dug his heels into its sides. This time when it came down the distance was wider, the black’s eyes rolling wildly as it shied.
 

“I am sure you know our group,” Rachel said in a voice that shook only a little. “We were formed in January of this year as the Ashepoo River Farmers Cooperative.” She hadn’t moved, knowing he was trying to bully her. Besides, she knew something about horses, and was not afraid of being run down. “A grant has been made to the co-op. It will give the small farmers in this area a chance to diversify their crops and improve their standard of living, something that will benefit the whole economy.” She felt as though she could recite the aims and purposes of the United Friends Service grant with her eyes closed, so familiar had they become. “This especially applies to the tenant farmers here who have little capital or investment in machinery and can’t make a living growing cotton anymore. It is not a new idea. As you probably know, boats from Draytonville used to go to Charleston and back for many years with loads of fresh corn, tomatoes, and other produce as well as fish and shrimp—”
 

“Shut up.” He brought the sweating, protesting horse up short in front of her. “I want you to stop talking and get that truck the hell out of here.”
 

Rachel was breathing hard in spite of herself. He had forced the stallion so close, the front of her clothes were layered with dust and sand. Undaunted, she met that fierce look in the hard, suntanned face with her chin raised.
 

“Just let us through the gate.” A compromise, at least for the moment, would save their precious cargo of tomato plants wilting in the back of the pickup. The bad-tempered horseman who claimed to be Beaumont Tillson could argue with them about the road and the right of way later. “The tomato plants cost so much money,” she tried to tell him, “we really can’t afford to lose them. Surely you will...” Her words died away.
 

For a split second she saw his eyes widen slightly, as if he couldn’t believe that she continued to resist him. “Turn that goddamned truck around.” He lifted his tanned hand to point. “Tell Wesley Faligant to get it the hell out of here—right now.”
 

Rachel did not budge. “I feel that you
will
let us through, if only,” she added quickly, “for today.” She took a deep breath. “There is no harm in doing fellow human beings a good turn when they need it, now is there?”